We used the FMOD library to create the audio engine, which actually was fairly simple to work with. The hardest part was setting up the development environment, since there wasn’t much documentation to work from, but a few blog posts in particular really helped with the process. I’ll leave them here for future reference: ...
[Jose] FMOD was easy to set up and very intuitive to use. One issue I encountered was that some audio clips would mysteriously loop, even though I never enabled looping during sound initialization. The fix was to explicitly specify whether each sound should loop or not.
SFML. SFML Audio actually was incredibly easy to use and set up. It made directional audio completely free since we just had to specify the position of the listener, the position of the sound effect, what direction was up, and certain qualities of each sound effect (attenuation, min distance, volume). I would definitely recommend any group to use SFML for audio since I can’t really imagine an easier to use API. The one limitation is that the directional audio only works on mono sound files, so if it were really important players could pinpoint exactly where a sound effect is in 3d space then it isn’t ideal, but I don’t think many 125 projects would require that level of precision.
For sound, we composed audio with Audacity, and did voice effects with the awesome Melodyne software. We included audio in our game with FMOD.